Archive for May, 2015

The field of economic, like most academic disciples has its pros and cons on all subjects. One of the most hotly debated issues is the economic health of this country. As the stock market struggles to maintain its soaring heights, others point to the nation’s shrinking middle class and its swelling impoverished ranks.

However, economists around the world point out that 50% of the world’s wealth is controlled by 1% of the population, and in the U.S. as elsewhere the situation may be getting worse not better.

For instance, retailers expected shoppers to rush into stores after that recent horrible winter was over, but it didn’t happen. And some stores just can no longer wait for things to turn. As theeconomiccollapseblog.com points out:

“The reason is that American consumers typically do not voluntarily pull back like that on spending, but do so because they have run out of credit. And if credit is running thin it will surely be felt in all spending.

“The truth is that middle class U.S. consumers are tapped out. Most families are just scraping by financially from month to month. For most Americans, there simply is not a whole lot of extra money left over to go shopping with these days.”

Also pointing to some 6,000 major U.S. retail stores closing in 2015 and coming years that blogger asks: “If retailers are closing this many stores already, what are our malls and shopping centers going to look like a few years from now?” Included in his lists are some stores owns by: Sears, Abercrombie & Fitch, Barnes & Noble, Chico’s, Coach, J.C. Penney, Macy’s, Target, Walgreens, etc.

In ‘Guess What’s Destroying the Middle Class?,’ Noah Smith posits: “Perhaps the biggest question in American political economy right now is why middle-class wages have been falling. There are three main hypotheses. Roughly, these are: Robots, unions and China.”

While some would add internet shopping to that list, in truth Smith argues that the greatest enemy of America’s middle class is China: “ . . . there is a growing body of research showing that globalization––and, in particular, the rise of China––has been the biggest factor hollowing out the American middle class.”

Larry Elliott and Ed Pilkington of theguardian.com write in ‘New Oxfam report that half of global wealth held by the 1%’ that “Billionaires and politicians met in Davos Switzerland earlier this year in the World Economic Forum . . . Oxfam said the wealth of the richest 80 doubled in cash terms between 2009 and 2014, and that there was an increasing tendency for wealth to be inherited and to be used as a lobbying tool by the rich to further their own interests.”

While Oxfam cannot state the obvious because it hopes to collect funds,
the truth is that attendees and sponsors of ‘secret’ meetings like those in Davos have planned for such economic disparity for years. They further plan that those in lower classes will soon become further enslaved to them or die off by the billions.

Such are these last days of which Apostle John writes in the Book of Revelation: “And I beheld, and lo a black horse; and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand. And I heard a voice . . . say, A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; . . . And . . . behold a pale horse: and his name . . . was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth (6: 5 – 8).”